They don’t make them like this anymore!
(Yes, I know it’s from the “Daily Fail”)

Richard Attenborough, the British actor and film director, has died at the age of 90.

Lord Attenborough’s son Michael confirmed that he died at lunchtime yesterday, just five days away from his 91st birthday.

He was one of Britain’s leading actors, before becoming a highly successful director.

The director - hailed as ‘a titan of British cinema’ - appeared in films including Brighton Rock, World War Two thriller The Great Escape and later in dinosaur blockbuster Jurassic Park.

Prime Minister David Cameron said he ‘was one of the greats of cinema’.

Others expressing their love for Lord Attenborough included Ben Kingsley, who shot to superstardom after his performance as Mahatma Gandhi, and fellow actor Sir Roger Moore, who said he was ‘a wonderful and talented man’.

Zamperini, whose harrowing life story inspired the bestselling novel “Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience and Redemption,” grew up in Torrance and was set to lead the iconic parade down Pasadena’s Colorado Boulevard Jan. 1. He died Wednesday.

A standout track-and-field star at USC, Zamperini competed in the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, where he was the top U.S. finisher in the 5,000-meter race.

He retired from running during World War II and joined the U.S. armed forces. While serving as a bombardier on a reconnaissance mission, his aircraft crashed into the Pacific Ocean. He survived 47 days on an inflatable raft in shark-infested waters until being captured by the Japanese.

Zamperini remained in captivity for two years, during which time he was tortured, and was eventually listed as being killed in action by the U.S. government.

Poignant images captured in the aftermath of the Nagasaki bombing are to be sold at auction in New York this week.

The collection of 24 newly discovered photographs taken by Japanese military photographer Yosuke Yamahata depicts the devastation wrought by the atomic bomb at the end of the Second World War.

Yamahata was on an assignment near Nagasaki when the bomb dropped on 9 August 1945. Upon hearing the news he took a train to the city along with the writer Jun Higashi and the painter Eiji Yamada, arriving at 3am the following day.

Heidegger has become a complicated hot mess for philosophy. Whether on not we need to salvage the man, in my opinion, is beyond the point. What philosophy needs is to disconnect the idea of personality in relation to philosophical merit, and instead, let the philosophy stand on its own.

Philosophy has long feared the logician as some sort of existential reaper. However, logic is not destroying philosophy - the cult of personality is.

Philosophy has long punished those who were too quick to hold onto logic as a determination for value in the fields of theoretical thought, preferring to venture into the riskier world of husserlian ontological free association and Hofweberian free love.

Surely, logicians triumph when someone like Heidegger’s theories become contextually more complicated. When:

1) Nothing non-absolute can causally or ontologically be the basis for an absolute

2) Logicians created logic

3) Logicians are not absolute

4) Therefore, logic is not absolute

becomes :

1) Nothing beginning can be the basis for an absolute

2) Logicians intended to create logic

3) Logicians never calculated for the paradox of beginning…

4) Therefore, logic never even began.

The joke has now turned on the husserl-ites. Surely it is the logicians getting the last laugh. Which leads us to the basic question i was beginning to ask:

Arguably the most influential European philosopher of the 20th century (only Ludwig Wittgenstein rivals him for the title), Heidegger has long been known to have been a National Socialist. He joined the Nazi Party in 1933 and remained a member through 1945. He eagerly served in an administrative post as rector of Freiburg University after Hitler assumed power. He praised the “inner truth and greatness” of National Socialism during a lecture in 1935. Never once did he express a word of moral condemnation of the Nazis or the Holocaust. (He died in 1976.)

And now, a philosophical diary Heidegger kept through World War II has just been published, displaying blatant examples of anti-Semitism. Heidegger’s defenders have always noted that the philosopher flatly rejected the explicitly racial theories promoted by the Nazis, and the so-called “black notebooks” apparently corroborate that. But they also contain passages denouncing “world Jewry,” the distinctively Jewish “talent for calculation,” and the “collusion of ‘rootless’ Jews in both international capitalism and communism.” These sound like quotes lifted straight out of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

….Heidegger’s greatness lies in his relentless, stunningly radical questioning of settled positions in the history of Western thought. Indeed, in many of the lecture courses leading up to the publication of Being and Time, in much of that book itself, and in several other courses from the late 1920s and early ’30s, Heidegger treated philosophy as a way of life resolutely devoted both to posing radical questions and to resisting the urge for answers.

Heidegger’s criticism of the history of Western thought is that since the time of Plato and Aristotle, philosophers have abandoned questioning in favor of proposing answers that have become dogmas that stand in the way of genuine thinking. (This is one reason why Heidegger called Socrates — who never wrote a word and spent his days antagonizing his fellow citizens with pesky questions — the “purest thinker in the West.”)

Private Bud Kelder went missing during World War II. Evidence suggests he’s buried as an unknown soldier in Manila. Will the Pentagon ever move to identify him?

At the center of the military’s effort is a little-known agency, the Joint Prisoners of War/Missing in Action Accounting Command, or J-PAC, and its longtime scientific director, Tom Holland. He alone assesses whether the evidence J-PAC has assembled is sufficient to identify a set of remains: A body goes home only if he signs off.

Bud Kelder, far left, before WWII. John Eakin saw this picture of his distant cousin on the wall of his great aunt’s house when he was 15 and asked who he was. That was the first time he learned of Bud’s story - and the only time he saw his grandpa cry. (Courtesy of John Eakin)

Though finding missing service members can be difficult — some were lost deep in Europe’s forests, others in Southeast Asia’s jungles — Holland’s approach has stymied efforts to identify MIAs even when the military already knows where they are. More than 9,400 service members are buried as “unknowns” in American cemeteries around the world. Holland’s lab has rejected roughly nine out of every 10 requests to exhume such graves.
Holland’s cautious approach is animated by a fear of mistakes.

How could Imperial Japan have defeated the United States during the Second World War?

I’m not much of one for alt-history; it’s too much like writing fiction, a genre for which I have no gift. Prophesying about what would have happened had one of the antagonists done this or that quickly degenerates into a guessing game. Still, it is possible to identify some things Tokyo could have done to improve its chances of prevailing over an industrial giant that only needed time and resolve to build up overwhelming military power. Bottom line, the weaker side has to fight smart to win against the strong.

Herewith, my list of five ways Imperial Japan could have offset the resource disparity:

The flickering black and white films of men going “over the top” in the First World War seem impossibly distant. Yet, the idea that the great powers of today can never again stumble into a war, as they did in 1914, is far too complacent. The rising tensions between China, Japan and the US have echoes of the terrible conflict that broke out, almost a century ago.

The most obvious potential spark is the unresolved territorial dispute between China and Japan over the islands known as the Diaoyu to the Chinese and the Senkaku to the Japanese. In recent months, the two countries’ aeroplanes and ships have shadowboxed near the islands. Alarmed, the US dispatched a top-level mission to Beijing and Tokyo in late October, made up of four senior members of the US foreign policy establishment — including Stephen Hadley, who ran the National Security Council for George W. Bush, and James Steinberg, who served as Hillary Clinton’s number two at the State Department.

This bipartisan US delegation made clear that a Chinese attack on the islands would trigger the security guarantees that America had made to Japan. The obvious danger is that, as in 1914, a small incident could invoke alliance commitments that lead to a wider war.

The American group was well aware of the risks. As Joseph Nye, a Harvard professor who was part of the four-person mission puts it: “We discussed the 1914 analogy among ourselves. I don’t think any of the parties wants war, but we warned both sides about miscommunications and accidents. Deterrence usually works among rational actors, but the major players in 1914 were also rational actors.”

SteveMcGaziBolaGateIt's just a game of brinksmanship. I don't see millions of Chinese swarming to the call of their communist leaders any more than they did when Chaing Kai Shek tried to mobilize the Chinese. Soviet and American planes and ships ...

Why do some people choose to run into a burning building while others remain immobilized? What makes this person run inside? What internal drive allows him to act against the Darwinian instincts that cry out for self-preservation? How does this man up-end human nature? The answer is both simple and complex.

Every hero chooses to give something up. It may be his safety or it may be his dignity or may be something of value. The hero always gives something up. But there is more.

Below is the story of how some people chose to be heroes, coming to the rescue of others- and in doing so put their own lives at risk. It is bt extensin, a story of the people who chose to do nothing.

A person may only be in such a situation but once in his or her life.

The opportunity to be heroic manifests in the smallest of our choices. Every day, heroes of every kind make choices that define their identity and character. As inconsequential as the small choices seem, we can never know the effect that each of our actions has on someone else. Every person can recalls a few words, off handed remarks or the small action of another in passing, that still resonates within us. The person who spoke those words or committed the particular action may not even realize their significance or how those words or actions have impacted us.

Heroism is a choice. Fate may determine whether or no we will have the opportunity to run into a burning building or hide defenseless people. Whether or not that ever happens is besides the point. To commit to a moral life is a series of decisions that are made over a lifetime. To make a moral choice is to make a commitment to act. To choose to be a hero is by definition, moral clarity.

I’ve been spending time in two places that were, in the last century, tested with awesome violence. One, a great ravine found now within the city limits of Kiev, Ukraine, was the site of one of the most deadly massacres of the Holocaust. There, on September 29 and 30, 1941, German occupation forces assisted by Ukrainian auxiliary police rounded up almost 34,000 Jews and shot them to death. The ravine into which their bodies tumbled was called Babi Yar. The other place, the Plateau Vivarais-Lignon, in south-central France, is up high and hard to get to. Living in relative isolation, its people have evolved their own folkways over the centuries. The actions of these villagers were almost unparalleled in the history of the Holocaust: Many of the region’s 24,000 residents helped rescue about 5,000 people, some 3,500 of them Jews and most of them children, from near-certain death during World War II.

Tangles of trees and harsh winds are part of both places’ stories. The roads through the woods of each led, in the darkest moments of the last century, to two spectacular precipices. In those moments, with their insistent swirls of killing in the name of nation or race or religion or class, there were still various roads to choose from. What road takes you to one precipice, or the other? Given the limits of choice and of will, how does one find the right way?

Kiev—still struggling to come to terms with its bone-filled muds—can’t be compared analytically to the Plateau Vivarais-Lignon in any responsible way. The places are so unalike, their histories so distinct, the nature of the surrounding violence of entirely different magnitudes. But in both locations, more-or-less regular people faced tremendous pressure to preserve their own well-being to the detriment of targeted neighbors and strangers. Their responses were vastly different. In considering the two side by side, I aim not to curse nor to praise any given people (who endured moral tests the likes of which most of us will never have to face), but rather to meditate on these questions: How do small actions of groups, in the aggregate, make huge differences? How can social habits—the things we learn from childhood and pass on to our children—teach us immunity to the winds that whip around us, terrify us, tell us that we must think of ourselves first?

Some 165 murders a day. That is the horrifying conclusion reached by an historical commission assigned the task of exploring the full extent of Nazi war crimes committed in Italy in World War II. The identity of many of the murderers has long been known, but to this day little has been done to bring them to justice.

Roberto Oligeri still lives in the small village in Toscana where his family was murdered. The killers marched into the hamlet on Aug. 19, 1944. Held at gunpoint, his father, who ran a small inn, was forced to serve Sturmbahnführer Walter Reder and his underlings a meal. As they dined on roast chicken and regional wine, soldiers from the 16th SS Mechanized Infantry Division combed through the village and surrounding area and rounded up women, children and a handful of old men. When Reder had finished his meal, he gave the order that all of them be killed.

“On that day, 160 people in our village were muredered, including my five siblings — two brothers and three sisters. The oldest was 19 and the youngest just three,” says Oligeri.

Neighboring villages experienced the same fate as SS troops beat, murdered and burned men, women and babies in that August of 1944. Some 560 people died in the mountain village of Sant’Anna di Stazzema on August 12 alone.

The crimes have never been atoned for nor have they been adequately addressed by the judiciary. An Italian court did sentence 10 of the SS thugs involved in the Sant’Anna di Stazzema massacre to life in prison in abstentia, but Germany never extradited them. And just recently, a court in Stuttgart refused to pursue the case, saying that murderous intent could not be proven.

This is the LGF Pages posting bookmarklet. To use it, drag this button to your browser's bookmark bar, and title it 'LGF Pages' (or whatever you like). Then browse to a site you want to post, select some text on the page to use for a quote, click the bookmarklet, and the Pages posting window will appear with the title, text, and any embedded video or audio files already filled in, ready to go.

Or... you can just click this button to open the Pages posting window right away.

From Sen. Schumer's Facebook page: There are two simple reasons the comparison does not hold water. First, the federal RFRA was written narrowly to protect individuals' religious freedom from government interference unless the government or state had a compelling interest. ...

UPDATE MARCH 30: NEW TIME FOR LIVE STREAM - 11:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. PDT NASA's Low-Density Supersonic Decelerator (LDSD) project will be flying a rocket-powered, saucer-shaped test vehicle into near-space from the Navy's Pacific Missile Range Facility on ...

What's this? Another article on Cracked about how incorrigibly tribal-minded us homo sapiens are? Well, yes. But the proverbial devil is in the proverbial details. Proverbially. It's still worth reading. That's what I'm getting at. Everyone is talking about Scientology ...

China attacks the biggest code repository in the world. After battling a distributed denial of service attack for four days, GitHub on Monday was able to restore normal service levels. The primary target of the assault is greatfire.org, which is ...

An American woman--presumably not Muslim, though she doesn't say one way or the other--married to a Libyan man is taken aback when her 9-year-old daughter suddenly wants to start wearing hijab. This is the story of how conflicted she felt ...

NEW YORK, March 27 (Reuters) - Big Wall Street banks are so upset with U.S. Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren's call for them to be broken up that some have discussed withholding campaign donations to Senate Democrats in symbolic protest, ...

By Lawrence Hurley WASHINGTON, March 30 (Reuters) - The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday declined to hear a new challenge to President Barack Obama's healthcare law that took aim at a bureaucratic board labeled by some Republicans as a ...

Depending on the outcome of a hearing scheduled for Monday, a 33-year-old Indiana woman could face up to 70 years in prison for what she says was a miscarriage. Reproductive rights advocates say her case is a disturbing example ...

Spence Jackson, the chief spokesman for the late Missouri auditor Tom Schweich, died over the weekend from an apparently self-inflicted gunshot wound. Jefferson City police said Monday they responded to a call Sunday evening at Jackson's apartment. They found ...

On Friday, Motherboard reve​aled that fully functioning Uber accounts were for sale on the dark web. Today, it appears that some people have fallen victim to fraudulent trips being made with their login credentials. "It happened this morning," Phil ...

Are conservatives anti-science? Spoiler: Conservatives aren't anti-science or pro-science. But, they are pro-common-sense. And once more scientists adopt common sense approach to science, they'll find that they have the support of conservative politicians - the people whose job it is ...

cracked.com Once the fighting started, a lot of people died, well over a million on our side alone. For the war to continue, a constant stream of new fighters had to join up, and they didn't have the benefit of ...

Here is an interesting article on one of Tail Gunner Joe's sick witch hunts that has, unfortunately, been forgotten. I try not to feel schadenfreude of the fate of McCarthy's side kick, Ray Cohn, but I never succeed.

About the Graphic How should a woman try to get ahead in a male-dominated workplace? Perhaps the answer lies less on women "manning up" and more in how businesses value their employees. Many women confront this tension as they ...

If we accept the idea of Orthopraxy over Orthodoxy, then what does evangelism look like? What is the Witness of those who try to follow the Way of Christ Jesus? To evangelize is to spread the good news that we ...

A short column in The Nation that is a must read. The primary difference between liberalism and conservatism, at least in theory, is that the latter is an ideology and the former isn't. Conservatism, as Milton Friedman argued, posits that ...

This is a powerful admission of culpability and I applaud his courage in making it. It really should be read in its entirety. Glenn Ford should be completely compensated to every extent possible because of the flaws of a system ...

Sarah Vine of the DM gets it wrong: SARAH VINE: Teaching 11-year-olds about rape is a form of child abuse The problem with this country, I've come to realise, is that it treats adults like children and children like adults. ...

Frank says:

And all the rest of whom for which to whensoever of partially indeterminate bio-chemical degredation. Seek the path to the sudsy yellow nozzle of their foaming nocturnal parametric digital whole-wheat inter-faith geo-thermal terpsichorean ejectamenta. -- From board tape at Zappa concert, outdoors, at Blossom Music Center, Akron, Ohio, summer 1984. This quote was in the middle of a spoken section of "The Mud Club" in which a dude walks into the club with a blue Mohawk and proceeds to "work the floor, work the wall, work the monitor system. . . ." The band was having monitor feedback problems at the Blossom concert, and there are numerous references to P.A. equipment throughout this ramble. Other than that, the quote is meaningless, I guess. But great imagery!